A moment comes like a thunderbolt, in which a flash of the undisclosed rends our dark apathy asunder. It is full of overpowering brilliance, like a point in which all moments in life are focused, or a thought which outweighs all thoughts ever conceived of. There is so much light in our cage, in our world, it is as if we were suspended amidst the stars.

Apathy turns to splendor unawares. The ineffable has shuddered itself into the soul. It has entered our consciousness like a ray of light passing into a lake. Refraction of that penetrating ray brings about a turning in our mind: we are penetrated by God’s insight. We cannot think anymore as if God were there and we are here. God is both there and here. God is not a being, but Being in and beyond all beings.

A tremor seizes our limbs.

Our nerves are struck, quiver like strings.

Our whole being bursts into shudders, but then a cry wrested from our very core fills the world around us as if a mountain were suddenly about to place itself in front of us.

It is one word: “God.”

Not an emotion, a stir within us, but a power, a marvel beyond us, tearing the world apart. The word that means more than Universe, more than Eternity.

Holy!

Holy!

Holy!

We cannot comprehend it. We only know it means infinitely more than we are able to echo.

Staggered, embarrassed, we stammer and say, “God,” who is more than all there is, who speaks through the ineffable, whose question is more than our mind can answer; “God,” to whom our life can be the spelling of an answer.

– From Man is not Alone, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr., an ally of his in the civil rights movement, an anti-Vietnam war activist, and a profound religious thinker of the 20th Century.

“He says before this paragraph that in general we resist the knowledge that’s coming at us. We stay inside what he calls a cage and live on a “dainty diet” because we’re apprehensive about what is waiting for us outside. But then, at a certain moment…something happens to us.”